Women on the shortlist: who is left for promotion to the cabinet?

Jacqui Smith – the first female home secretary and now the first female home secretary to resign – looks like being joined on the backbenches by Hazel Blears after Gordon Brown's reshuffle. The communities secretary, in trouble for "flipping" her second home allowance and for joking at Brown's expense with her "YouTube if you want to" line, is likely to be demoted out of the cabinet this week.

If Smith's departure was misfortune, Blears's would be chalked up as carelessness but for the fact that Beverley Hughes has announced she would depart the lower ranks of government, and the former health secretary, Patricia Hewitt, said she would be leaving parliament altogether. Brown, it will be said, has a less than careful relationship with women.

When Blair left he had eight female cabinet ministers. When Brown came in he downsized that to five female "full time" cabinet ministers, and four who could attend cabinet all or some of the time.

Some quickly coalesced into a friendship group with a nickname – the WAGs, 'Women Against Gordon' movement – so good it didn't matter whether they liked each other. Smith, Blears, the Olympics minister, Tessa Jowell, the minister for Europe, Caroline Flint, and the former transport secretary Ruth Kelly are all described as having plotted against Gordon Brown in the past. But they did like each other. They were said to have held dinners every six weeks and their take on Brown was: we're just not that into him.

A former No 10 adviser said: "He [Brown] doesn't have a gender problem with this reshuffle, we have an everything problem. Will there be enough Brownites for Blairites or Blairites for Brownites? And crucially, enough of everyone else to neuter the fact Ed Balls has been made chancellor? Women, I'm afraid, don't come into it."

A former Downing Street aide who has seen a Brown reshuffle said: "Gordon will not be thinking about gender, but Harriet Harman [Labour's deputy leader] certainly will and Sue Nye [his gatekeeper] will too. They won't let him forget it."

Brown does like women, it's just that he likes the kind of female minister who breaks off from having an (enforced) manicure because she can't be separated from her BlackBerry (true story).

So, though they are not household names, his options for promotion to the cabinet include his close ally, Lady Vadera, the business minister, or giving Margaret Beckett the right to attend cabinet as a fully-fledged member again (as housing minister she comes to meetings, but is formally outside the cabinet).

The public health minister, Dawn ­Primarolo, a loyal Brownite, is a possible; some even suggested that the Blairite Hilary Armstrong might make a surprise return. Less likely is Kitty Ussher, the junior work and pensions minister – young, but damaged in the expenses scandal by a letter revealing her request to spend £20,000 souping up her house.

But that list was run past one very senior minister and apart from Vadera and Beckett each name met with a "no". Which means there are few options for promotion. "Yes," this senior minister said. "There are certain facts for a government that you can not go backwards on. And this government can not go backwards on gender equality. But it looks like it is going to. Very bad. Bad bad bad."